With Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer flaming out at Wimbledon, it’s pretty much a lock for Novak Djokovic, who rolled in the second round over Bobby Reynolds.
Odds are Djokovic will win the tournament, but his victory will be as empty as the calories in a French baguette.
Oh, wait – Djokovic has never won the French Open.
Wake us when he does.
The Boston Herald gets the Murder Ink award today with this front page:
The feisty local tabloid draws a more detailed picture in its lead story on the increasingly lurid Aaron Hernandez investigation . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
Police Commissioner Ed Davis has officially become a litmus test in Boston’s mayoral race.
It started with this piece in Wednesday’s Boston Herald:
Conley promises to retain top cop
Puts feud with Davis behind him
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley yesterday vowed to keep Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis if elected mayor, as a rift between the two men appears to have ended.
“Commissioner Davis and I have had a very close working relationship for many years now. We are in constant communication anytime there are issues involving the public safety in Boston,” Conley told the Herald.
In the past, the DA and Davis have clashed over jurisdictional issues and strategies for dealing with Boston’s homicide rate.
That triggered this piece in Thursday’s Boston Globe (which credited the Herald for raising the subject) . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
Well the Missus and I trundled down to Brockton to catch the Fuller Craft Museum’s Across the Grain: Turned and Carved Wood exhibit and, say, it was swell.
Fuller Craft Museum is excited to present an exhibition of wood art that reveals the scope of its Permanent Collection (with 49
turned, carved, assembled, and repurposed pieces) as well as another 66 pieces selected from friends of Fuller Craft Museum (15 lenders in eight states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky). The exhibition includes the first wood object acquisition Totem#2, a 1963 sculpture by Varujan Boghosian, given the year after the Museum’s modernist building was opened in 1969.
One other example: Michelle Holzapfel, Vermont Spoons, 2010.
And lots of other great wood work as well.
Also of interest: The Fuller Craft’s exhibition Reversible Reactions: Art Meets Science @ The MIT Glass Lab.
Well worth the trip.
This week the Federal Trade Commission addressed the blurring of the lines between advertising and editorial content on search engines.
From MediaPost:
Search engines are increasingly blurring the differences between paid ads and organic listings, the Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday.
“In recent years, the features traditional search engines use to differentiate advertising from natural search results have become less noticeable to consumers, especially for advertising located immediately above the natural results,” Mary Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices, said in letters to search engine operators. The letters marked the agency’s first major guidance to search engines since 2002, when the agency stated that search companies should clearly differentiate sponsored ads from organic results.
The letters were sent to dozens of companies, including Google, Bing, AOL and Yahoo.
APM’s Marketplace has a smart interview here, and the New York Times provides these helpful examples from Google . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
BP, the energy company that engulfed the Gulf in oil with its Deepwater Horizon meltdown in 2011, has begun a newly aggressive ad campaign after groveling to the American public for the past two years.
Full-page ad in Wednesday’s New York Times:
Background:
Nut graf:
Not sure anyone’s buying that. But we’ll see.
The Boston Herald always delights in any adversity visited upon the Boston Globe. So it was no surprise that Wednesday’s Schadenfreude Gazette framed the upcoming sale of the stately local broadsheet in the least promising way possible.
It’s time to sell the Globe
Bids due tomorrow for daily as experts say price won’t be high
Tomorrow is D-Day at The Boston Globe, as bids for the newspaper’s pending sale are closed by parent company The New York Times, and analysts tell the Herald their expectations for a blockbuster selling price are low.
“I can’t believe it’s making much money, if any money,” said Edward Atorino, a media analyst with the Benchmark Company. “Circulation is declining. Advertising is struggling. Boston online hasn’t really set the world on fire.”
Media expert Ken Doctor of Newsonomics predicted the Globe could sell for between $75 million and $150 million — a far cry from the $1.1 billion the Times paid for the paper in 1993.
Oh, and on the way out, don’t forget to tweest . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
As the hardtracking staff noted earlier, the Boston Herald has ventured into the Blog New World of stealth marketing with its online State of the Arts section, which packages marketing material as editorial content.
On Tuesday, the Herald’s print edition jumped into the mix, via The Edge:
Close-up . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Behold the Miami-Industrial Complex:
That MiamiWhereWorldsMeet crowd got together to run this ad in Tuesday’s New York Times celebrating the Heat’s second consecutive NBA Championship:
You know what’s really So Miami?
400,000 people turned out for the victory parade.
Roughly the same number who leave Heat victories early.
(Just for scale, the Boston Celtics 2008 victory parade drew one million people.)
Can’t stand the Heat? Just wait, according to AlterNet.
‘Miami, As We Know It Today, Is Doomed. It’s Not A Question Of If — It’s A Question Of When’
Climate change is for real — and Miami has front row seats. Scientist’s explanation is highly shocking.
Jeff Goodell has a must-read piece in Rolling Stone, “Goodbye, Miami: By century’s end, rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin.”
Helpful chart:
Okay, then. Bring on the Heat.
Well, that’s just sad.
The hardworking staff has a habit of recording mangled phrases in the press, and here’s our latest batch.
• About a week ago, the Boston Globe ran a story about CBS’s decision to stop broadcasting the July 4th Boston pops fireworks gala. David Mugar, the show’s executive producer, lamented that “the rest of the country will not be able to see Boston in its finest.”
Actually, that would be at its finest. Or maybe in its finery. But probably the former.
• Last month, a report on APM’s Marketplace included the phrase “if many follow in his lead . . . ” – which should have been follow his lead or follow in his footsteps. But probably the former.
• A New York Times Magazine piece on the Obama-Romney 2012 bakeoff, in which the reporter mused, “Sitting in the dark motel room, I got a sentimental yearning again – for something that might break with the predictable regiment that followed a Sobering National Tragedy.” The hardyearning staff is pretty sure he meant regimen.
• On CBS This Morning, New Republic publisher Chris Hughes commented that something or other is “harder said than done.”
• In the Boston Globe, Legal Seas Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz said of the restaurant chain’s controversial ad campaigns “we like the tongue and cheek, the double entendre if you will.”
• An NPR report said Obama administration officials had told Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi “don’t fuel the flames” of protest in his country. Better he should not fan the flames or add fuel to the fire, yeah?
• An automobile ad claimed “we’ve got you covered eight ways to Sunday.” Not to get all calendar about it, but shouldn’t that be six ways from Sunday?
• MSNBC’s First Read described New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as “a firebrand who doesn’t shirk from a fight.” Huh? Shrink from a fight, yeah? Or shirk his duty. But probably the former.
• The New Hampshire Journal in 2012:
NECK-IN-NECK
A new poll shows the presidential race tightening . . .
Say no more.
• Former NBA player Reggie Miller on Hall-of-Fame siblings: He and his sister Cheryl “have bragging rights until I guess maybe the Mannings will be brother brother in the Football Hall of Fame, but for now, I don’t see anybody coming down the pipe.”
Actually, that would be coming down the pike or in the pipeline. Not to get technical about it.
• Finally, from ABC’s The Note: “Once again we have to ask: Is the 2012 election just a lot of sound and the fury signifying nothing?”
Hey, Noteniks: Lose the the, and you might be on to something.
And that’s the prose and cons of it.
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